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    #26
    I quit Facebook 11 years ago. This would be right around the time it was suggesting I tag myself in photos based on it detecting my face.

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      #27
      Originally posted by Snake Plissken View Post
      If you think WhatsApp is bad, Google and Facebook are really going to bake your noodle.
      I guess you are right in this. I dread to think by how much.

      All those Covid-19 anti vaccination conspiracy theorists who say that Bill Gates is injecting a chip into you that can be read under UV light must have all destroyed their phones and gone to live in the wilds off grid then.

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        #28
        Originally posted by Antepli Ejderha View Post
        Thanks, so that's not an option then. Looks like it's going to be a combination of Signal and Telegram then.
        This might steer you towards signal, ae.






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          #29
          Signal is Dominic Cummings’ weapon of choice for a reason.

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            #30
            What's the reason?

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              #31
              It’s the most secure and untraceable. Haven’t used it myself but having read up on it, the end to end design seems incredibly well thought out.

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                #32
                Yeah, that is probably the usual tradeoff between security and ease of use. And the difference in approach between techie nerds and actual real people.

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                  #33
                  I got bullied into using Telegram by some friends and it seems ok, people seem to think it has security and that, and also funny pictures. So yeah, secure yet fun.

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                    #34
                    https://www.independent.co.uk/voices...-b1785562.html

                    Thought this was a good article.

                    Also WhatsApp have said this doesn't apply to the UK, the mass data gathering that is, yet.

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                      #35
                      Mention elsewhere reminds me - this is a chart of the access each popular messenger app requests from iOS.

                      https://twitter.com/signalapp/status/1346258308496150528

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                        #36
                        https://www.zdnet.com/article/i-look...d-is-spinning/

                        Probably the best place to put this.

                        It's about how Teams tracks users, important for all of us having to use it at work.

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                          #37
                          Speaking as a qualified Teams Admin, ex-MS and someone whose Masters thesis was about privacy implications of social media, my considered opinion on that article is that it is a massive pile of horseshit.

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                            #38
                            For example, does Teams really record the actual messages a user posts in a Teams chat?
                            Of course it fucking does. How the hell do you think it maintains a fucking history you can fucking search through you fucking idiot?

                            I also asked whether there was anything an individual employee can do to enhance their own Teams privacy.
                            Not use a work provided service for non-work things? You know, like has been the way people should operate since the dawn of fucking time.

                            And don't even get me fucking started on that fucking graphic about the list of things recorded.

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                              #39
                              Originally posted by Snake Plissken View Post
                              Speaking as a qualified Teams Admin, ex-MS and someone whose Masters thesis was about privacy implications of social media, my considered opinion on that article is that it is a massive pile of horseshit.
                              Fair enough, that's good to know.

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                                #40
                                The problem is that it is it tries to present Teams as a chat / message app when it is a full on collaboration platform.

                                And that is before we get to the idea that Teams doesn't ever store anything. It's basically a place where all the "other stuff" is gathered in one place for the user to see - an access point. A one to one chat is stored in the originating users OneDrive. A group chat is stored in the Exchange mailbox associated with the Office 365 Group that gives permissions to the Team. Files are stored in a SharePoint site walled off to the O365 Group. You don't need Teams to access any of this stuff - it just does all the heavy lifting for you.

                                And yes, all this stuff is tracked and potentially available to the organisation because they are the ones paying for and providing the service and because the user is using their tenant to do these things they have a responsibility to be able to manage it. At a previous gig, one guy was using the 1Tb that OneDrive gives every user to send porn clips to other people in his department and we spotted it because his usage was slowing down the corporate network. So the admins had a look and guess what, we had a bloody long paper trail before we even got permission to look - because as admins even though we're God on the system, we take the idea of user privacy really bloody carefully.

                                And finally (but probably not) - when you use a WhatsApp, or Facebook, or whatever, that stuff is tracked and used and conglomerated outside of the domain from which it was gathered. When there is an Office 365 instance, only the customer can see the content. Microsoft can't actually see it, unless you specifically grant them time-limited permission which you have to click first and by prior arrangement. (It's called Customer Lockbox.)

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                                  #41
                                  It's only "a full-on collaboration platform" if it's installed as such. For us, it's just a thing to have calls and meetings on, with a sidebar of text chat.

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                                    #42
                                    It's still got all that going on under the hood, you just aren't seeing it. The only time the Teams client is doing anything by itself is if you're in a 1:1 call, then it routes it peer to peer. Add another person and it goes through the Azure servers.

                                    It's just a Electron app in the end.
                                    Last edited by Snake Plissken; 18-01-2021, 12:26.

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                                      #43
                                      Speaking as a O365 expert and a current MS employee, I endorse the sentiments and words of Snake.
                                      I find some of these articles hilarious personally. Written by self-appointed experts who have no idea what they are on about.

                                      Btw 1-1 Chats are stored in a hidden folder in the users mailbox and not the OneDrive.
                                      There is currently an ongoing issue with retention and Teams Chats that is causing issues for larger environments.

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                                        #44
                                        Oh aye, it’s the images that go into OneDrive. Unless they’ve changed it.

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                                          #45
                                          Originally posted by Snake Plissken View Post
                                          It's still got all that going on under the hood, you just aren't seeing it.
                                          Oh sure. I just get cheesed off that there's so much we can't do that might be useful.

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                                            #46
                                            At the risk of giving away where I work, half the users can’t do Teams calls because the Citrix environment can’t handle it and the other half are only allowed to use the browser version.

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                                              #47
                                              Originally posted by Snake Plissken View Post
                                              At the risk of giving away where I work, half the users can’t do Teams calls because the Citrix environment can’t handle it and the other half are only allowed to use the browser version.
                                              Hahahah, You have just narrowed it down to about 99% of all environments with that setup.
                                              Chief culprits are the under resourcing of the Citrix environment and the Citrix HDX driver.

                                              This is a good place to start if you haven't seen before.
                                              https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/mic.../teams-for-vdi
                                              https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix...-ms-teams.html

                                              ​​​​​​​

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                                                #48
                                                Yes, I’ve seen them. When asked “How would you sort out our Citrix environment?”, my answer of “Dump it and buy everyone a 600 quid laptop” wasn’t acceptable.

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                                                  #49
                                                  Thanks for all of this, much has gone way over my head.

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                                                    #50
                                                    Heh. This is likely to become a generic data privacy thread.

                                                    Ultimately, there are applications that are basically monitoring your usage and nicking your personal data from not just their own app but also across the entire device in order to sell it for targeted advertising. On the other side of the coin there are work based collaboration apps which keep track of everything that you do inside that particular application in order to provide you with functionality that helps you work across inter-connected apps in a business environment. As a by-product of that tracking the admins can produce usage and analysis reports for use within the company.

                                                    And too many journalists who really should know better are conflating the two*.

                                                    I'm always happy to explain what monitoring and privacy Windows / Office 365 / Azure does if anyone has any concerns and I suspect TG and TonTon would too.



                                                    *It occurs to me that "computer journalism" is much like "car journalism" in that very few of them in the business do anything other than review and promote their preferred products. There is a lot of bad behaviour in the industry that goes unremarked upon and little real outlet for it. Working practices, privacy abuse, the fight against spam and other malware. Hell, there must be a book in how GamerGate was a breeding ground for the tactics that gave us Trump and MAGA. You never hear about much of it.

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